Questions on effort and resources required for deployment

["Jaeger, Jay" <ja...@dot.state.wi.us>]

We are facing a situation where an ESB (perhaps Synapse, for example) might
actually be able to do something for us.  We have a relationship with a
local university organization who occasionally need data from us, and vice
versa.  Often these data feeds are recurring, so setting up something that
was automated, and accessible as a web service, front-ending things like
databases (perhaps federating information from more than one table) might be
very useful

The question I have is related to the investment required.  How much time,
effort and money might be required to get things set up and getting things
running.  Now, having been largely lurking on this list, I have some of my
own ideas, but I'd be very interested in what other folks on the list have
experienced:

1)  Are you using Synapse in production?  [If not, thanks for reading....]
2)  How many different application / data feed connections are you
supporting in production?
3)  How many of those are application integration connections (one
application talking to another real time)
4)  How many of those are data feed connections? (an application getting
data out of a database, flat files, XML, and so forth)
5)  What does your infrastructure look like:  hardware, software components
in addition to Synapse?
6)  How long (elapsed) did it take you to get your first connection
operational?
7)  How much effort (person-hours) did it take to get your first connection
operational, including "ramp up" time on Synapse itself?
8)  What has been your biggest struggle?

If enough folks are interested, I would consider putting these questions
(and perhaps others suggested by others) up on something akin to Survey
Monkey and send out a link, and report back to the list.

(PS:  No, I am not selling anything.   8^)  I work for a government agency
that has had some interest in an ESB, but haven't done anything yet).